Venezuela's Collapse Shows Why We Need A Museum Of Communism

Venezuela's descent proves anew that communism always ends the same way. What begins in moral bankruptcy concludes with actual bankruptcy. Between these endpoints runs a cycle of increasing repression.

As we approach the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik takeover of Russia on Nov. 7, it's time to reflect on the disaster of communism. Because while few communist regimes remain, their fundamental failings are eternal.

Case in point: Venezuela, which warrants close scrutiny as a museum-piece of fatally flawed policies.

Despite many periods, names, and places, communism's versions share two defining traits: state control of the economy and the polity. This deadly combination yields two inevitable results: failure and repression. Over a century and a half after Marx, communism has always followed this course.

Like so many others, Hugo Chavez sought to square communism's circle. He renamed it, transplanted it, and updated it, but he — and now all of Venezuela — could not escape its fate.

Elected president four times and serving from 1999-2013, Chavez implemented his Bolivarian Revolution. Although terming himself a Marxist, he did not start on the hard left; however, he increasingly went that direction.

Abroad, he aligned with Cuba and South American socialist governments and opposed capitalism and the U.S.

As Chavez took control of Venezuela's economics, so too Venezuela's politics. Elections came to have as little value as the currency.

Following Chavez's death four years ago and the ascension of his hand-picked successor, Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela's economic and political descent accelerated into utter free fall now.

Marx stated: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." In Venezuela, that road is now a superhighway. According to the conservative Heritage Foundation's 2017 Index of Economic Freedom, Venezuela was next to last — just ahead of North Korea and behind Cuba.

Heritage categorized Venezuela as having moved into the repressed group of nations in 2004. Its freedom score is just 33.7%, less than half America's 75.4%. The IMF projects Venezuela's real GDP will drop 7.4% this year, following last year's 10% plunge. With last summer's fraudulent elections ensconcing Maduro's hand-picked Assembly, political freedom effectively no longer exists.

Numbers alone do not translate Venezuela's litany of misery. Corruption and violent crime are rampant. Inflation is estimated at 600% annually and Venezuela is believed to have only $10 billion in foreign currency reserves, if that.

Food and basic necessity shortages are so widespread that it is widely claimed that 75% of Venezuelans have lost almost 20 pounds on the contemptuously dubbed "Maduro diet." Those able to leave, have — an estimated 1.8 million escaping between 1999 and 2015. And the flood continues.

Chavez's "Socialism for the 21st Century" looks remarkably and sadly like the 19th and 20th centuries'. The pattern is as predetermined as the outcome. A market-driven economy is replaced by a state-driven one. Resources are redirected from more productive ones.

As government subsidies proliferate, products and services are overused and the cost of providing them escalates. Because government economic redirection yields ever less, there is less ability to offset rising costs. Expropriation, nationalization, borrowing, and the printing of money are all utilized to slow the vicious, but inevitable, cycle.

As the economy decelerates, political repression accelerates. The reason is simple: People do not willingly accept an economic miasma. They must be forced.

Once the economic decline/repression incline cycle starts, it is only a question of time. The collapse's timing depends only on the government's willingness to apply force to slow the dissolution.

Some regimes dissolve relatively peacefully — the jailers just walking away as in much of Eastern Europe. Others become virtual nationwide gulags — as in Cambodia and North Korea — extending their reigns by extending their people's misery.

There is a reason why no communist utopia has lasted more than three generations. And why so few of these relics remain today. As Venezuela prepares to shrink the shortening rolls further, it is time Washington had a museum dedicated to communism's depredations.

Khrushchev famously dismissed capitalism: "We will bury you, history is on our side." Many at the time believed him, especially on the left.

Then, history lacked the overwhelming accumulation of failure that the 1980s' global collapse of communism provided in rapid succession.

Many liberals still refuse to accept it. Even as they perform the labors of Hercules to attribute sins to the right, they are equally scrupulous in ignoring the left's larger ones and prefer the rest of the world do so too.

It is important that America and the world remember the left's colossal errors and its equally grotesque crimes against humanity — primarily its own citizens.

The commonly accepted number for those killed by communism is a staggering 94 million people in the 20th Century. Stalin said "a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."

It is impossible to say how many more Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, and China will add this century — only that they will. It is vital we not let Venezuela and its predecessors become simply footnotes of history. Or even worse, alternatives for the future.

Young served in the Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget from 2001 to 2004 and as a congressional staff member from 1987 to 2000.

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